This invention relates to cutlery principally for cooking use such as a kitchen knife, a petit knife, or cooking scissors and the like, each having antibiotic activity. This invention also relates to cutlery composed mainly of a sintered body of titanium. This invention relates further to means for imparting antibiotic properties to cutlery composed mainly of titanium.
Owing to disgraceful incidents of mass poisoning from mishandling of food in school cafeterias, a great interest in sanitary food handling has arisen. At the same time, research into providing antibiotic properties to tableware and various kinds of cooking tools have become very active. Particularly, kitchen cutlery for cooking such as kitchen knives, paring knives, scissors for cooking and the like are indispensable for cutting edibles such as root crops, leaf crops, meat, fish or the like. Because most cutlery for cooking today is made of stainless steel, research for cutlery of stainless steel containing an amount of copper is practiced. This is because stainless steel itself has no antibiotic properties. However stainless steel cutlery containing copper provides copper ions from the cutlery body during cutting. The copper ions enter the water contained in the edibles being cut. The copper ions show an antibiotic action. Also, it is known that silver ions also possess antibiotic properties.